Sublime

These are worlds that will be revealed not by better instruments but by new models and frameworks that allow us to see the familiar world in unfamiliar ways—to transform domains described into domains rigorously quantified and observations informally sensed into those formally understood.

According to the principles of quantum mechanics, anything that can move does move, spontaneously. As a result, the distance between two points fluctuates. Upon combining general relativity with quantum mechanics, we calculate that space is a kind of quivering Jell-O, in constant motion.

For perhaps the most fundamental message of all is that we do understand many aspects of the physical world very deeply. As Albert Einstein put it, “The fact that [the universe] is comprehensible is a miracle.” That, too, was a hard-won discovery.

What if we, one day, will be as far behind cognitively, relatively, as cavemen are to us? Is there any reason to believe at all we have reached the peak of human consciousness and ability? The burden of proof is in many ways on those thinking we have somehow hit a ceiling than it is on anyone claiming we haven’t. What if one day we could actually w

some form of complexity theory is required if we are to understand many of the intimate, and patently uncertain, interactions found in modern society.

In his 2014 book, Superintelligence, the philosopher Nick Bostrom illustrated the danger using a thought experiment, which is reminiscent of Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Bostrom asks us to imagine that a paper-clip factory buys a superintelligent computer and that the factory’s human manager gives the computer a seemingly simple task: produce